Reading List · Lisanne Swart
The Best Books Published in 2000
2000 is not a year that gets written about much. It sits at the turn of the century with nothing to prove, and the books people still name from it are mostly the ones they read for pleasure rather than the ones that won things. That is fine by me. These five are my own picks: two that are as close to pure reading pleasure as the form gets, the best book about writing I know, one that won the Pulitzer, and one I have put here with a warning attached. It is a personal list and not a ranking — further down there is a much longer list of what else came out in 2000, and a table of which prize went where.
By Lisanne Swart · 5 books · Fiction & Non-fiction · All first published in 2000
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Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
The fourth Harry Potter novel is where the series turns dark. The Triwizard Tournament, the Yule Ball, the return of Voldemort — this is the book that broke open the scope of the world Rowling had been building and made clear that what started as a children’s story had become something else entirely. Bloomsbury and Scholastic brought it out on 8 July 2000, the first Potter book published on the same day in Britain and America, and at 636 pages in the British edition more than twice the length of any of the three before it. It won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2001, the only Harry Potter book ever to do so. For many readers it is the point at which the series became unmissable.
I will not pretend to be objective about this one. Goblet of Fire is my childhood — the book I was exactly the right age for at exactly the right moment, and the first one in which the world stopped being safe. I have reread it as an adult and the plotting holds up better than I expected: it is intricate, the stakes are real for the first time, and the ending lands with a weight the earlier books could not have carried. But I am not going to pretend I can read it neutrally, and I would not want to.
A Storm of Swords
The third volume in the A Song of Ice and Fire series contains what many readers consider the most shocking sequence of events in modern popular fiction. Martin had spent two books establishing that no character was safe — and then he proved it in a way that left readers genuinely stunned. Voyager published it in Britain on 8 August 2000 and Bantam Spectra in America that November. If you have seen 2001 on a copy, that is the British paperback, which was split into two volumes, Steel and Snow and Blood and Gold. Dense, morally complex, and impossible to put down.
If you have only watched the TV adaptation, you owe it to yourself to read this. The Red Wedding on the page is a completely different experience — slower, more intimate, and significantly more devastating. This is the book that made the series impossible to ignore.
On Writing
Half memoir, half masterclass. King began the book in 1997, finished two of its sections and put it away; he picked it up again in June 1999 and was hit by a van on a road in Maine later that same month. So it is not, as is often written, a book written in response to the accident — it is a book the accident interrupted. He writes about that, about the decades of work that came before, and about everything he has learned about the craft of writing fiction. Scribner published it on 3 October 2000. It is the most useful book about writing I know, and it is also just a very good book — entertaining and honest in equal measure, with no patience for pretension.
This is the book I would hand to anyone who wants to write anything — fiction, non-fiction, long-form journalism, essays. The craft advice is specific and applicable, but what makes it stay with you is King’s conviction that the work matters and that the only way to get better at it is to do it. Endlessly re-readable.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Two cousins in New York create a comic book superhero called The Escapist. The story starts in 1939: one of them has just been smuggled out of Prague and is trying to get the rest of his family out too; the other is trying to escape himself. Random House published it on 19 September 2000 and it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001 — the prize awarded in 2000 went to a book from 1999. A sweeping, generous, brilliantly constructed novel about art, escape, identity, and what it costs to make things in a world that is trying to destroy you.
This is the kind of novel that reminds you what the form is capable of at its best. Chabon writes with an exuberance that never tips into excess, and the story he tells — about two young men making something beautiful in the shadow of catastrophe — is one of the most sustained and moving in American fiction of the past thirty years.
The Tipping Point
Gladwell’s first book asks why some ideas, products, and behaviours suddenly spread like epidemics while others never take off. He identifies three types of people who drive social change — Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen — and traces the moment when something crosses the threshold from contained to contagious. Little, Brown published it on 1 March 2000. It launched a genre and a career.
The Tipping Point is still the clearest introduction to how Gladwell thinks — a single memorable idea used as a lens on human behaviour, then illustrated with a series of compelling case studies. It is on this list as a model of accessible non-fiction writing, not as a reliable account of how the world works. Its broken-windows chapter has not held up, and in October 2024 Gladwell said so himself on a stage: “I was wrong.” And a large network experiment found the opposite of what the Law of the Few predicts. Read it for the shape of the argument and check the argument somewhere else.
Not sure where to start?
If you want the most purely enjoyable read on this list
→ Start with Goblet of Fire or A Storm of Swords — both are page-turners of the highest order, whether or not you know the series.
If you want the book that will most directly improve your life
→ Read On Writing. Even if you never write a word of fiction, it is a book about doing work seriously that applies to almost everything.
If you want literary fiction at its most ambitious and rewarding
→ Read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Clear a weekend.
If you want the one I would most like to argue with you about
→ The Tipping Point. Read it for how an argument is built, not for whether the argument is right — that part has not aged well, and Gladwell agrees.
Books first published in 2000
Fourteen more books whose first publication genuinely falls in 2000, for when you want breadth rather than a recommendation.
Ship of Destiny
Robin Hobb · Voyager
The third Liveship Traders book, and the one people name most often when they say a list of 2000 has left something out.
The Blind Assassin
Booker Prize
Margaret Atwood · McClelland & Stewart, September
Her first Booker, after three shortlistings.
White Teeth
Debut
Zadie Smith · Hamish Hamilton, January
Her first book, at twenty-four, and it took five prizes including the Whitbread First Novel and the James Tait Black.
English Passengers
Whitbread
Matthew Kneale · Hamish Hamilton, March
Whitbread Book of the Year, and Booker-shortlisted the same year.
Kitchen Confidential
Anthony Bourdain · Bloomsbury
The book that turned a working chef into a writer. Not his first book, though: two novels came before it.
Deadhouse Gates
Steven Erikson · Bantam, September
A 2000 book in Britain only. The first American edition came out in 2005, which is why American lists date it wrong.
Page
Tamora Pierce · Random House
The second Protector of the Small book, and one that turns up on more grown-up lists than you would expect.
House of Leaves
Debut
Mark Z. Danielewski · Pantheon, March
A debut novel with footnotes that run sideways and a page you have to turn upside down.
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Dave Eggers · Simon & Schuster
A memoir, not a novel, and a Pulitzer finalist in General Nonfiction.
The Amber Spyglass
Philip Pullman · David Fickling, October
It won the Whitbread Book of the Year for 2001 — the first children’s book ever to take it.
In the Heart of the Sea
National Book Award
Nathaniel Philbrick · Viking, May
The nonfiction award, for a book actually published that year.
Perdido Street Station
China Miéville · Macmillan
Won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Not his debut — King Rat came in 1998.
Storm Front
Debut
Jim Butcher · Roc, April
His first published novel, and the first of the Dresden Files.
The Brethren
Best seller
John Grisham · Doubleday
The best-selling adult novel in America that year. Goblet of Fire is not on that list at all: Publishers Weekly counts children’s books separately.
First books published in 2000
Five writers whose first book came out in 2000 — and the difference between a first book and a first novel, which is where most lists go wrong.
White Teeth
Zadie Smith
Her first book, published when she was twenty-four. It won the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Guardian First Book Award, the Commonwealth Writers First Book Prize, a Betty Trask Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
House of Leaves
Mark Z. Danielewski
His debut novel.
The Hiding Place
Trezza Azzopardi
Her debut novel, and it went straight onto the Booker shortlist.
Storm Front
Jim Butcher
His first published novel.
The Tipping Point
Malcolm Gladwell
His first book, though not a first novel — he had been a staff writer at the New Yorker for years.
2000 in books, in short
- Nobel Prize
- Gao Xingjian, “for an œuvre of universal validity, bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity, which has opened new paths for the Chinese novel and drama”. The official wording uses the œ ligature. See every Nobel winner
- Booker Prize
- The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood — a 2000 book, and her first Booker after three earlier shortlistings
- Pulitzer, fiction
- Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri — awarded in 2000 for a book published in 1999. See every Pulitzer winner since 1980
- National Book Award
- In America, Susan Sontag, for fiction, and In the Heart of the Sea, Nathaniel Philbrick, for nonfiction — both of them books of that same year
- Orange Prize
- When I Lived in Modern Times, Linda Grant
- Whitbread
- English Passengers, Matthew Kneale
- Prix Goncourt
- Ingrid Caven, Jean-Jacques Schuhl
- Hugo Award
- A Deepness in the Sky, Vernor Vinge. Goblet of Fire took it the following year, the only Harry Potter book ever to win it
- Best seller
- The Brethren by John Grisham topped the Publishers Weekly list of adult novels in America. Goblet of Fire is not on that list at all, because it was counted on a separate list, because Publishers Weekly does not count children’s books in that ranking. The New York Times had done the same thing a few months earlier, launching a children’s list in July 2000 after Harry Potter had spent nearly two years in the top three of its adult one
The Pulitzer awarded in 2000 went to a book from 1999, and the one 2000 book on this page that won a Pulitzer, Kavalier & Clay, won it in 2001. That is the trap in every list of “2000 books” built from prize records. The Booker, the Whitbread, the Goncourt and both National Book Awards did go to books of their own year.
Frequently asked questions about the best books of 2000
What books were published in 2000?
2000 was a strong year at both ends of the shelf. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and A Storm of Swords are the two books from that year that readers I go back to most. Margaret Atwood won the Booker Prize with The Blind Assassin, Zadie Smith made her debut with White Teeth, Michael Chabon published The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and won the Pulitzer with it the following year, and Stephen King published On Writing. Outside fiction there were The Tipping Point, Kitchen Confidential and In the Heart of the Sea. Further down this page there is a longer list of the books first published in 2000.
What is the best book from 2000?
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, if you let me answer for myself, because it is my own childhood and I am not going to pretend otherwise. If you want a novel for adults, read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay — it is the most ambitious book of the year and it won the Pulitzer. If you want one book from 2000 that will change how you work rather than how you feel, read On Writing.
How is this list put together, and why only five books?
It is a personal list. These are five books published in 2000 that I recommend, not the output of a ranking or a formula. Five, because that is how many from that year I would actually press on someone. If you want breadth rather than a recommendation, the list further down this page has fourteen more books first published in 2000, and the table under it has the prizes.
What books were released in 2000?
The five I would recommend from what was released in 2000 are Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (July), A Storm of Swords (August), On Writing (October), The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (September) and The Tipping Point (March). Beyond those five: White Teeth in January, House of Leaves and English Passengers in March, In the Heart of the Sea in May, The Blind Assassin in September, The Amber Spyglass in October and A Man in Full — no, that one is 1998. The full list of books released in 2000 is further down this page, with the month for each one I could date.
What were the most popular books published in 2000?
By sheer reach, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which sold around three million copies in America in its opening weekend and pushed the New York Times into inventing a separate children’s bestseller list. The Brethren by John Grisham was the best-selling adult novel in America that year. The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman and Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo both found very large readerships, and Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain turned a working chef into a household name. Popular and good are not the same list, which is why the five at the top of this page are mine rather than the market’s.
Who won the Booker Prize in 2000?
Margaret Atwood, for The Blind Assassin — her first Booker, after being shortlisted three times before. The shortlist also held The Hiding Place (Trezza Azzopardi), The Keepers of Truth (Michael Collins), When We Were Orphans (Kazuo Ishiguro), English Passengers (Matthew Kneale) and The Deposition of Father McGreevy (Brian O’Doherty). Kneale won the Whitbread Book of the Year with his.
Who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2000?
Gao Xingjian, the Chinese-born French novelist and playwright, “for an œuvre of universal validity, bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity, which has opened new paths for the Chinese novel and drama”. The Swedish Academy sets “œuvre” with the ligature; most reproductions quietly change it.
Was On Writing written after Stephen King’s accident?
No, and this is the thing most accounts get backwards. King started the book in 1997, finished two of its sections and set it aside. He picked it up again in June 1999 and was hit by a van later that same month, on a road in Maine. So the accident interrupted a book that was already half built. It was not the first thing he published afterwards — Hearts in Atlantis came out three months after the crash and Riding the Bullet in March 2000 — but the section about the accident and the recovery is the part of this book that was written last.
Is A Storm of Swords a 2000 book or a 2001 book?
It is a 2000 book. Voyager published it in Britain on 8 August 2000 and Bantam Spectra in America that November. The confusion comes from the British paperback, which was split into two volumes, Steel and Snow and Blood and Gold, and both of those came out in 2001. The French split it into four.
Is The Tipping Point still worth reading?
As writing, yes. As an account of how the world works, treat it carefully. The broken-windows chapter has not held up: Harcourt and Ludwig found no support for it in the New York data or in a randomised five-city housing experiment, and in October 2024 Gladwell said from a stage that he had been wrong about it. And the Law of the Few ran into the opposite result: in Duncan Watts’s large network experiment, highly connected people were not crucial to how information spread. The book is still a model of how to build an argument for a general reader. It is just not a good reason to believe the argument.
Which writers published their first book in 2000?
Zadie Smith published White Teeth, her first book, and won five prizes with it. Mark Z. Danielewski published House of Leaves and Trezza Azzopardi The Hiding Place, which went straight onto the Booker shortlist. Jim Butcher published Storm Front, the first Dresden Files novel. And Malcolm Gladwell published The Tipping Point, his first book though not a first novel. Two that are often miscalled debuts: Perdido Street Station is China Miéville’s second novel, and Kitchen Confidential is Anthony Bourdain’s third book — he had written two novels first.
What happened to books in 2000?
Two things worth knowing. In March 2000 Stephen King published the novella Riding the Bullet as an e-book only, for 2.50 dollars: more than four hundred thousand people downloaded it in the first day, and it is usually called the first mass-market e-book. And in July 2000 the New York Times launched its first new bestseller list in sixteen years, for children’s books, because Harry Potter kept taking the top places on the adult one. Potter took the top four slots on the new list immediately.
Footnotes
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire 2 facts
Bloomsbury and Scholastic published it on 8 July 2000, the first book in the series released on the same day in Britain and America, at 636 pages.
It won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2001, the only Harry Potter book to do so. It beat A Storm of Swords, which was also nominated.
A Storm of Swords 3 facts
Voyager published it in Britain on 8 August 2000 and Bantam Spectra in America in November 2000.
The British paperback was split into two volumes, Steel and Snow and Blood and Gold, both published in 2001 — which is why copies dated 2001 turn up. The same split happened in Ireland, Australia, Serbia, Israel, Poland and Greece; France split it into four.correction
It won the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel in 2001.
On Writing 3 facts
King began the book in 1997, completed two of its sections and set it aside in early 1998. He returned to it in June 1999 and was struck by a van on Maine State Route 5 later that same month. The popular version, that the book was written in response to the accident, is the wrong way round. It was also not the first thing he published afterwards: Hearts in Atlantis appeared in September 1999 and Riding the Bullet in March 2000, and Wikipedia’s own article on this book gets that part wrong.correction
Scribner published it in 2000, and it won the Locus Award for Best Non-fiction in 2001.
This page names the road but not the driver. His name is in King’s own book and in the newspaper reporting; leaving it out is a choice, not a sourcing problem.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay 2 facts
Random House published it on 19 September 2000 and it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001. The Pulitzer awarded in 2000 went to Interpreter of Maladies, a 1999 book.correction
It was also nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and came sixteenth on the New York Times list of the hundred best books of the twenty-first century in 2024.
The Tipping Point 6 facts
Little, Brown published it on 1 March 2000. It is Gladwell’s first book.
The three types are Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen, grouped in the chapter called The Law of the Few.
In October 2024 Gladwell told a TEDNext audience in Atlanta that his broken-windows explanation for the fall in New York crime was wrong: “I was wrong.”correction
Malcolm Gladwell apologizes for popularizing ‘broken windows’ theory — Good Good Good
Harcourt and Ludwig analysed New York crime data from 1989 to 1998 together with the randomised Moving to Opportunity housing experiment across five cities, and found the evidence gave no support for a simple disorder-to-crime relationship.correction
Duncan Watts’s network experiments found that highly connected people were not crucial to how information spreads, which is the opposite of what the Law of the Few predicts.correction
This page previously said the ideas “have been debated and challenged”. That is too soft for what actually happened, so it now says what did not hold up and who says so.correction
2000 in books 24 facts
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2000 went to Gao Xingjian, with the citation quoted on this page. The official wording uses the œ ligature in œuvre.correction
Margaret Atwood won the Booker Prize 2000 for The Blind Assassin; the shortlist is as listed on this page.
The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction awarded in 2000 went to Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri, published in 1999.correction
Susan Sontag won the 2000 National Book Award for Fiction with In America. The National Book Foundation gives the publisher as Farrar, Straus and Giroux but prints no year; the first edition is dated 2000, which is what this page follows. Wikipedia’s infobox says 1999.correction
In the Heart of the Sea was published by Viking on 8 May 2000 and won the National Book Award for Nonfiction that year.
Linda Grant won the Orange Prize for Fiction 2000 with When I Lived in Modern Times.
Matthew Kneale won the Whitbread Book of the Year for English Passengers, published by Hamish Hamilton on 14 March 2000 and also Booker-shortlisted.
The Amber Spyglass won the Whitbread Book of the Year for 2001, the first children’s book ever to take the overall award.
Jean-Jacques Schuhl won the Prix Goncourt 2000 for Ingrid Caven, published by Gallimard on 7 September 2000.
The Blind Assassin was published by McClelland & Stewart on 2 September 2000.
White Teeth was published by Hamish Hamilton on 27 January 2000 and won five prizes: the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Guardian First Book Award, the Commonwealth Writers First Book Prize, a Betty Trask Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
House of Leaves was published by Pantheon on 7 March 2000.
Storm Front was published on 1 April 2000 by Penguin Putnam, under its Roc imprint, and is the first of the Dresden Files.
Perdido Street Station is China Miéville’s second novel, not his debut: King Rat came in 1998. It won the Arthur C. Clarke Award.correction
Kitchen Confidential is Anthony Bourdain’s third book, not his first: the novels Bone in the Throat (1995) and Gone Bamboo (1997) came before it.correction
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is a memoir and was a Pulitzer finalist in General Nonfiction.
The Brethren by John Grisham topped the Publishers Weekly list of bestselling adult novels in America in 2000. That list does not include children’s books, which is why Goblet of Fire is not on it.correction
Publishers Weekly list of bestselling novels in the United States in the 2000s — Wikipedia
Riding the Bullet was published on 14 March 2000 as an e-book only, at 2.50 dollars, and was downloaded more than four hundred thousand times in the first twenty-four hours.
The New York Times launched its first new bestseller list in sixteen years, for children’s books, in July 2000, after Harry Potter had spent more than twenty months in the top three of the adult list. Potter took the top four places on the new list at once. This page said August, which is the date of the Salon article and not of the launch.correction
Deadhouse Gates is a 2000 book in Britain only — the first American edition was Tor in 2005, which is why American lists date it 2005.correction
Page by Tamora Pierce is the second Protector of the Small novel, published by Random House in 2000.
Ship of Destiny was published by Voyager in 2000.
Kitchen Confidential was published by Bloomsbury in 2000. Wikipedia gives August and several booksellers give May, so this page gives only the year.correction
The Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2000 went to A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge.
Last verified 24 September 2026. Everything marked “correction” above is a place where this page said something different before. The substantial ones: On Writing was begun two years before the accident it is usually said to have been written in response to, and was not the first thing King published afterwards; the New York Times children’s bestseller list launched in July 2000, not August; and In America is a 2000 book, so both National Book Awards that year went to books of their own year. Where a source contradicts the version that circulates, the source wins. Anything I could not source to a named publisher, prize body, archive, library record, newspaper or reference work is not on this page. Where a Wikipedia article is the source, that is what the footnote says, and where it is wrong I have said so.
The notes on this page are all mine,
and the books are all theirs.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. See more on her personal bookshelf.
Where to go next
Pages on this site that pick up where 2000 leaves off.
Overview
Best Books by Year
Every reading list on this site, organised by year.
By year
Best Books of 1999
Disgrace and Interpreter of Maladies — the year before, and where the 2000 Pulitzer came from.
By year
Best Books of 2022
My picks from that year.
Genre
Best Fiction Books of All Time
The novels that stay with you longest.
From the bookshelf
A good book does not have an expiration date
More hand-picked recommendations on my personal bookshelf — books from every year that stay with you long after the last page.
Browse the full bookshelf Get book recommendationsMore to read
